Editor's note: It's easy to see how real-time collaboration eliminates frustration from your day or how mobile access from anywhere helps keep your projects moving forward even when you're on the go, but it takes a bit of number crunching to understand the impact across an entire company. To help make this easier, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to quantify the benefits a typical Google Apps for Work customer enjoys.

Companies across the globe face increasing pressure to stay competitive and meet their customers’ needs. Tools that allow teams to share ideas instantly, attend meetings remotely, collaborate from anywhere in real time and work on the go are helping companies innovate and engage customers in this new competitive landscape. These types of outcomes are possible only by “pure” cloud-based architectures that overcome the inefficiencies of legacy desktop- centric computing.

While it’s easy to understand how collaboration and mobility impact our day-to-day work, it’s more difficult for organizations to quantify these benefits in monetary terms.

So Google commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study examining the value that Google customers achieve by implementing Google Apps for Work. Forrester measured the total economic impact over three years for organizations moving from legacy on-premise infrastructure to Google’s web-based solution. To quantify the complete value of Google Apps for Work, including collaboration and productivity benefits, they interviewed six of our current customers. They then aggregated each piece of customer feedback to create a representative composite organization on which to base the development of a Total Economic Impact model.

The composite organization is a global B2B multinational services company with 10,000 employees using Google Apps for Work and $4 billion in annual revenue. The analysis they completed showed that this composite organization would realize millions in collaboration and mobility efficiencies in the course of three years.

Here are a few highlights from the report:

304% return on investment (ROI) Over three years, Google Apps for Work generated a risk-adjusted $17.1 million in benefits, outweighing the total costs of $4.2 million and resulting in a risk-adjusted ROI of 304%.

$8 million in collaboration efficiencies: Employees can streamline business processes by working together in real -time using Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, creating project collaboration spaces in Google Sites, and accessing and sharing files with Google Drive. These collaboration efficiencies save employees up to two hours per week — which, over three years, adds up to more than $8 million in savings.

$9 million in mobility benefits and legacy IT cost savings Google Apps for Work creates an environment where employees can work together, share ideas, innovate, evaluate decisions and improve business performance — all without having to be in a physical office. The ability to work from anywhere and join meetings remotely saves the composite organization more than $5 million in 3 years, while decommissioning legacy servers, software and phone systems saves another $4 million. And $9 million can go a long way.

Though these findings are the result of in-depth analysis, we strongly encourage any Google Apps customer to conduct their own impact analysis to see what specific benefits they experience from using Google Apps for Work. You can read the full study, “The Total Economic Impact of Google Apps for Work,” by visiting g.co/AppsEconomicImpact.